Functional genomics in the rice blast fungus to unravel the fungal pathogenicity

Abstract

A rapidly growing number of successful genome sequencing projects in plant pathogenic fungi greatly increase the demands for tools and methodologies to study fungal pathogenicity at genomic scale. Magnaporthe oryzae is an economically important plant pathogenic fungus whose genome is fully sequenced. Recently we have reported the development and application of functional genomics platform technologies in M. oryzae. This model approach would have many practical ramifications in design and implementation of upcoming functional genomics studies of filamentous fungi aimed at understanding fungal pathogenicity.

Identification and expression analysis of OsHsfs in rice

“…Rice is the most important cereal crop, which feeds more than a half of the world's population (Jeon et al, 2008). Molecular dissection of rice Hsf gene family would help to unravel the stress response mechanism in rice.…”

The C3HC type zinc-finger protein (ZFC3) interacting with Lon/MAP1 is important for mitochondrial gene regulation, infection hypha development and longevity of Magnaporthe oryzae

“…It is better to understand the specific function in each pathway, to provide biological evidence in eukaryotic development and pathogenesis with feasible molecular genetic manipulation methods. Since a large number of genes have been well investigated in this pathogen, they supply potential targets for rice blast disease control [4][5][6].…”

Magnaporthe oryzae cell wall hydrolysate induces ROS and fungistatic VOCs in rice cell cultures

“…The rice blast is one of the most serious diseases on cultivated rice and it is capable of destroying enough rice to feed 60 million people every year (Zeigler et al, 1994;Skamnioti and Gurr, 2009). Due to the experimental tractability and socioeconomic impact of rice blast, the fungus has served as an important model organism in studies aimed at understanding the biology of fungal plant pathogens (Jeon et al, 2008), the structure of pathogen population and the breakdown of plant resistance genes (Ebbole, 2007) and transcriptome profiling during invasive plant infection (Mathioni et al, 2011).…”